US Launches Smart Cities Effort

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Uncle Sam is looking for more than a few good engineers to help build smarter cities around the world.

The US National Institute of Standards and Technology is putting out a call to deploy the Internet of Things in smart cities applications around the US, Europe, and Asia. ARM Holdings, Cisco Systems, Extreme Networks, IBM, Intel, Juniper Networks, and Qualcomm have already signed up to participate in what amounts to a second round of the Smart America program.

Vendors and municipal agencies that want to participate will gather for an NIST event September 29 through September 30 to form teams and set goals. Teams will be organized by application areas that fan out to any and all participating cities including ones in Asia, Africa, and Europe.

"We want to see these things get out of the lab and deployed in real-world scenarios," said Sokwoo Rhee, an associate director of the NIST division focused on the smart grid and so-called cyber physical systems.

"It's a great opportunity for companies to show off and apply their technology, and individual engineers can contribute being a member of a team," said Rhee in an interview with EE Times.

The teams will move quickly. Their goal is to showcase their deployments in June 2015 events in various target cities.

Separately, Rhee is developing a framework document outlining reference architectures, use cases, and test beds for the Internet of Things in smart cities. "The idea is that the next time a city wants to become a smart city, it doesn't have to start from scratch," he said.

He will also draft an IoT strategy document that will act "like a road map for global connectivity fabric of the IoT... [providing direction on] how different technologies work together," he said.

NIST launched a public working group to help work on issues such as contributing to the framework documents and developing a taxonomy of IoT terms. About 150 people gathered on August 11 for the group’s first face-to-face meeting, creating sub-groups with due dates for deliverables in areas such as security, data interoperability, and use cases.

Smart City project today span the spectrum from big Corporations (IBM's Smarter Planet and electric company Smartmeters) to startups coordinating taxi services (Uber) and housing (Airbnb) to grass roots Smartphone APPs for reporting urban potholes. With so many players in such a distributed process, we're at risk of having a different APP and a different program for everything we do. I hope that some thought is being given towards creating a unified structure so that all these distributed systems can collaborate and present a coherent interface to the user.

well, it is time, since now we are third world country, if you look and compary with the rest of the world, just the prices are high not the provided service e.g. you pay $60 for a 1.5/ 0.350Mb/s internet service in the "Silicon Valley"

Every city has different needs and areas of improvement. For example, some cities might have traffic congestion problem, others might have law and enforcement problem while other might have basic necessacity and pollution problem etc. Identification of the biggest problem of the city should be the first step before thinking about the proposals.